TokenPenalty: Alleviating Attention Sinks and Positional Decay in LVLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often hallucinate due to two relevant phenomena: massive activation phenomenon and positional information decay. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level intervention strategy that dynamically suppresses irrelevant visual tokens while preserving key contextual signals. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TokenTruth significantly improves factual consistency across MLLMs on standard image understanding benchmarks. |
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Xiaofeng Zhang, Yihao Quan, Chen Shen, Chaochen Gu, Xiaosong Yuan, Shaotian Yan, Jiawei Cao, Hao Cheng, Kaijie Wu, Jieping Ye
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) suffer from significant computational overhead due to the quadratic growth of attention computations with the number of multimodal tokens. |
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